Marking Passages

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Select words to copy them, color them, or write a note against them — and decide how much of that you want to see while you read.

Selecting Text

Touch and hold a word to select it, then drag the handles to take in as much as you want.

A small bar appears over the words with four things on it:

  • Copy puts the words and the reference on the clipboard. It replaces the system's own Copy rather than sitting beside it, so there is only ever one Copy and it always carries the reference. Settings → Appearance → Include Reference chooses where that reference goes: in parentheses after the text, on a new line after the text, or on a new line before it.
  • Highlight colors the selection — see below.
  • Make Meditation sets the passage aside to dwell on. It is saved here whether or not you have Prayer Mentions, and it is shared with that app if you do — Meditations describes what happens to it. Nothing is sent anywhere else, and nothing leaves your device.
  • More opens the system's own menu, for Look Up and Translate, and for Share, which sends exactly what Copy would — the same words, numbers and reference.

A single whole verse is copied as its words alone. A selection across verses keeps each verse's number, the first included, and keeps the page's layout: verses run on as a paragraph or sit a line apart, as Settings → Appearance → Verse Layout shows them. Where your selection begins or ends partway through a verse, ... marks the words left out — `1 ...is my shepherd`.

If your selection touches no verse — a heading, say — Copy reads No Verse Selected and it, Highlight and Make Meditation are unavailable. They stay visible rather than disappearing, so the bar is the same shape wherever you select.

Tapping a verse number selects that whole verse, which is quicker than dragging when the verse is what you want.

Tapping elsewhere puts the bar away and keeps the words selected, so you can bring it back without selecting them again. Tap elsewhere a second time and the selection goes too. Scrolling puts it away as well.

Marking A Passage

Select some text and choose Highlight, then a color. FerventWord App then offers you a note, with the words you highlighted shown above it so you do not have to remember them — write one, or tap Skip. The highlight is already made either way.

New highlights go into whichever notebook is current. Notebooks explains what that means and how to change it — and a highlight already made can be moved to another notebook from the sheet that opens when you tap it.

A highlight that runs across several verses is one highlight. Tap any verse of it and you get the same note and the same actions, and removing it removes the whole thing. Its reference names the range — 23:2-4 rather than a single verse.

Where two highlights overlap, the colors blend into a third that means nothing — so tapping there names each one separately instead of asking you to decode it.

A highlight remembers its words, and the version they were highlighted in. Word positions do not carry across editions, so if you read the same chapter in another version the whole verse is highlighted instead, and the app tells you that is what happened rather than quietly coloring the wrong words. The same is true if a version is ever revised.

What A Highlight Says About Itself

Tapping a highlight opens what you can do with it, and above that it names the notebook the highlight is filed into and the day it was made.

It offers to change the note, copy it, or remove the highlight. There are three ways to copy, so it is always clear which you are getting: Copy Your Note, Copy Highlighted Text — the words and their reference — and Copy Highlight & Note, which gives you both. The two note ones appear only once the highlight has a note.

Colors

There are five colors. Red is not among them: red is how FerventWord App prints the words of Christ, and a red highlight would be indistinguishable from them.

What a color means belongs to the notebook you are in. Open a notebook under Settings → Highlights & Notes → Notebooks and you can give each color a name — Promises, Warnings, To Memorise — and turn off the ones you do not use there. Those words are that notebook's. A notebook you keep for next year can call green something else entirely, and the one you are reading now goes on saying what it says.

The picker offers whichever colors that notebook has turned on, and the names you gave them are what you see when you choose one, when you tap a highlight, and in the file if you export the notebook.

Settings → Highlights & Notes → Default Colors For New Notebooks is where a new notebook starts from. Changing those names leaves your existing notebooks as they are.

Settings → Highlights & Notes → Highlighter Set chooses how those colors are drawn. Soft Wash is the quietest and is what you start with; Marker and Fluorescent are brighter. It changes every highlight you have already made, and changes none of them back to anything — a highlight remembers its color, and the set decides what that color looks like, so you can try all three and go back.

Underline Highlights draws a line under a highlight in a darker shade of its own color. It is what makes a highlight carry when its color alone does not. Automatic — what you start on — draws it when Differentiate Without Color or Increase Contrast is on in the iOS Settings app, and leaves it off otherwise; Always and Never decide for yourself. The preview above the colors shows what the page will actually do.

Notes

A note belongs to a highlight. Settings → Highlights & Notes → Show Notes decides where you read them:

  • When I tap a highlight — nowhere until you ask.
  • At the end of the chapter — gathered after the last verse, in order.
  • Under the verse — each note directly beneath the verse it belongs to. With Paragraphs on (Settings → Appearance → Verse Layout) verses run together, so a note sits just after the paragraph its verse is in and names that verse.

Seeing Them, Or Not

Highlights are drawn whether or not you are looking for them. If you would rather read a clean page, set Settings → Highlights & Notes → Show Highlights to None; the highlights are still there, and there are two ways back to them. The reading bar's More menu has Show This Chapter's Highlights, which draws them for the bookmark you are reading until it is pointed somewhere new, and Menu → Your Highlights & Notes lists everything in a notebook, wherever in the Bible it is.

The reading bar's More → Share Chapter Highlights hands every highlight in the chapter — each with its name, its notebook and its note — to the share sheet as text, whatever the page is showing.

A reading opened from Today shows no highlights unless you ask it to. Turn on Show Highlights In Plan Readings at Settings → Highlights & Notes if you want your highlights there as well. Reading a chapter from Read is unaffected either way, and a highlight just made stays visible wherever you made it.

Highlights on the same words are drawn as stripes, one band of the line for each, the newest on top — so a yellow highlight with a green one over it shows both colors rather than only the green. Tap the words to see each highlight named, with its own note and its own Remove.

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